Dynamic vs Static user-interface : Which one is easier to learn? And will it make you more efficient?

Sammanfattning: Excel offers great flexibility and allows non-programmers to create complex functionality – but at the same time, it can become very nested with cells pointing to other cells, especially if there have been many changes over a more extended period. This has happened to ICS – a small company who has its focus on calibration, out of an array of different things relating to material testing. The system they have for field calibrations today have been overly complicated and hard to maintain and consists of multiple Excel spreadsheets. The conclusion has been that a new system needs to be developed – but question how, remains. By creating a prototype using modern web-technologies, this study has evaluated if a web application can meet the specific functional requirements ICS have and if it is a suitable solution for a new system. The prototype was put under manual user test, and the results find that the prototype meets all the requirements, meaning that a webapplication could work as a replacement. During the user tests, this study has also evaluated the differences in learnability and efficiency of users, between the static user interface of the current Excel-based system and the dynamic user interface of the web-based prototype. The users have performed a calibration with both systems, and parameters such as time to completion or number of errors made have been recorded. By comparing the test results from both systems, this study has concluded that a dynamic user interface is more likely to improve learnability for novice users, but have a low impact on efficiency for expert users.